Deng Zhiyang, Perry James M, Weiss Marian, Genth Robert, Autour Alexis, Merten Christoph A, Shih Steve C C
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Concordia University, Montréal, Canada.
Centre for Applied Synthetic Biology, Concordia University, Montréal, Canada.
Lab Chip. 2025 Jul 22. doi: 10.1039/d5lc00415b.
Droplet microfluidics has become a ubiquitous and powerful tool for high-throughput phenotypic screening at the single-cell level. Large numbers of cells can be sorted for a variety of functions, including the secretion of antibodies with tailored properties. The recovery of cells from sorted droplets is still very poor compared to droplet sorting, usually being limited to around 50% of all sorted hits. Here, we present a fully integrated droplet-digital microfluidic platform for the isolation and the recovery of rare single cells and applied our system to antibody discovery. From our work, we have achieved an 18-fold increase in the recovery rate of individual cells and beads from droplets, as compared to conventional methods. We believe that the combination of high-throughput droplet generation with the on-demand control features of digital microfluidics will improve the number of characterized hits in single-cell -omics, antibody screens, directed evolution of enzymes, and beyond.
微滴微流控技术已成为一种在单细胞水平上进行高通量表型筛选的普遍且强大的工具。大量细胞可根据多种功能进行分选，包括分泌具有定制特性的抗体。与微滴分选相比，从分选后的微滴中回收细胞的效率仍然很低，通常仅限于所有分选命中细胞的50%左右。在此，我们展示了一个用于分离和回收稀有单细胞的完全集成的微滴数字微流控平台，并将我们的系统应用于抗体发现。通过我们的工作，与传统方法相比，我们实现了从微滴中回收单个细胞和珠子的回收率提高了18倍。我们相信，高通量微滴生成与数字微流控的按需控制功能相结合，将增加单细胞组学、抗体筛选、酶的定向进化等领域中已表征命中细胞的数量。
